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Article In: Interpreting: Online-First Articles

Audience feedback on platform-mediated simultaneous interpreting in a livestream chat

 | National Taiwan University
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Abstract
Interpreting quality is often discussed in relation to users’ perceptions, yet most user-oriented evidence is derived from surveys or experiments that only partially capture the way evaluation unfolds under broadcast and platform conditions. This article examines the real-time reception of simultaneous interpreting in a digitally mediated public event, focusing on a remote audience. Their unsolicited evaluative discourse is produced in a livestream chat rather than in co-present interactions. The dataset comprises 1,405 interpreting-related posts drawn from the YouTube livestream chat accompanying TVBS News’s broadcast of Jensen Huang’s COMPUTEX Taipei keynote address (2 June 2024), viewed by more than 50,000 concurrent users during the livestream. The analysis uses a multi-layered coding framework that combines sentiment polarity, Appraisal Theory and categories for non-evaluative discourse. It maps distributional patterns over time and derives recurrent theme clusters. The results show that audience reception is dominated by competence-oriented praise. Viewers also collectively monitored the interpreting setup, such as handovers and technical features. A substantial share of the posts engaged in speculation about agency, attributing the output to artificial intelligence. This speculation often precedes substantive quality criteria. These patterns highlight how platform-specific features and reduced status and authority cues shape the pragmatics of evaluation, which intensifies both criticism and appreciation. The study extends user-oriented quality research by theorizing platform-mediated SI reception as a socially negotiated process. Within this framework, quality judgements emerge from the public negotiation of access channels (e.g., source vs interpreted streams), identity attribution (human vs machine) and participation norms.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Literature review
    • 2.1User-oriented quality research and methodological developments
    • 2.2Reception under broadcast and platform conditions
    • 2.3Research gap and the present study
  • 3.Methods
    • 3.1Data collection
    • 3.2Data analysis
  • 4.Results
    • 4.1Distribution and temporal dynamics
    • 4.2Aggregated themes
  • 5.Discussion
    • 5.1Collective reception patterns
    • 5.2Delivery cues and agency inference
    • 5.3Anonymity and online disinhibition in interpreter evaluation
  • 6.Conclusion
  • References
References (33)
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